Luigi Mangione for Secretary of Health and Human Services

The suspected shooter of UnitedHealthcare's CEO stepped into the gaping void left by the absence of government regulation of industry and he did a bang-up job. Why not give him a shot at a new role?

The news yesterday that 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been arrested and charged in connection with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is sure to increase the nauseating tut-tutting emanating from our moral betters in the C-suites and the media about the disturbing approval many of the country’s citizens have voiced in support of the previously unknown shooter since he struck last week. “The authorities have pleaded for help from the public...but in a macabre turn, some people seem to be more interested in rooting for the gunman and thwarting the police’s efforts, bewailed the New York Times in a December 7 story.

The article cited Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser at the Network Contagion Research Institute – whatever that grift is – who ratcheted up the whining to unendurable nails-on-blackboard levels. “It’s being framed as some opening blow in a broader class war, which is very concerning as it heightens the threat environment for similar actors to engage in similar acts of violence,” bleated poor Goldenberg, who was “pretty disturbed” by the “lionization of the shooter.”

I have a couple of sincere questions for Goldenberg, reporters at the New York Times, and all the other observers out there who are aghast at the vox populi. First, what the fuck did you expect? Second, and closely relatedly, why are you casting aspersions at the lionizers rather than pointing a finger at the depraved morality of the two groups of people who the public clearly loathes, very rightly, and which obviously explains why the shooter is viewed so favorably by contrast: top executives at health care giants and the country’s political leaders who’ve sat back for the past half-century or so and expressly allowed them to squeeze, cheat, rob, and kill Americans on a daily basis and not done a goddamn thing about it other than cash the latest campaign check from industry CEOs and ask them what else they can do to make sure they send more the next time.

Rick Perlstein summed the basic dynamics of the situation up nicely in a tweet on December 7. “The jacket the CEO-murderer wore is flying off the shelves,” he wrote. “That sort of popular anger was there to be harvested this past November by the Democratic Party, were they led with the kind of valor, empathy, and populist courage FDR showed.”

Before the FBI raids my house or I’m fully banned on social media – though the following mild disclaimers may not prevent either of those things from happening – I’m not calling for open season on healthcare CEOs, though I would welcome a “Lord of the Flies” scenario where the lot of them were dumped on a deserted island and the last man or woman left standing gets a participation trophy before being fed to sharks. Also, I feel sorry for Thompson’s family, especially his kids.

With that out of the way, I’ll note that Thompson got paid $10 million a year to run a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that had the highest rate of denied claims — almost one-third — in the entire health insurance industry, My solidarity is with the poor customers of his company, and I used to be one of them whereas now I’m a victim of another shit insurer because it’s just like politics, all consumers can do is vote for the lesser of the evils and hope they made the right choice. So fuck ‘em.

However, this isn’t primarily about Thompson not being exactly a five-star individual, though that’s true, as Ken Klippenstein has written about. Nor is it about UnitedHealthcare Group being an industry bottomfeeder, though that’s also true. Corporate CEO Andrew Witty brought home about $23.5 million in compensation last year, more than any other national insurer executive and 352 time higher than employees at the company’s bottom rung. The problem is systemic to the healthcare industry — and Corporate America in general — which is that the top companies have become so politically powerful that they’re free to ripoff their customers with the next outlandish price hike on premiums, coverage exclusions, or whatever other bullshit scam they cook up.

UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty. Photo via company website.

All this is the inevitable outcome of capitalism, which Marx and Engels explained in one of the few penetrable sections of “Capital.” It recounted how in 1863, Josiah Wedgwood, “himself originally a common workman,” led a group of 26 company owners who petitioned the British parliament to restrict the use of low-cost child labor in all pottery factories.

Wedgwood’s reasoning, which was impossible to gainsay then or now, was that no firm would unilaterally ban the practice as it would give a leg up to industry competitors who continued to employ children; hence, parliament needed to impose a flat industry-wide ban on child labor. “As much as we deplore the evils...it would not be possible to prevent them by any scheme of agreement between the manufacturers,” Wedgwood said. “Taking all these points into consideration, we have come to the conviction that some legislative enactment is wanted.”

Fast forward 160 years and it’s hard to find a corporate CEO anywhere who resembles Wedgwood, in part no doubt because fewer and fewer ever worked on a factory floor or at an entry level job of any sort. Thompson’s father was a grain elevator operator worker in Iowa but he received a degree in business administration from the University of Iowa in 1997, went straight to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers in a management position, joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004 in an executive position, and became CEO of its insurance arm three years ago.

Witty – excuse me, Sir Andrew Philip Witty – became a management trainee at of GlaxoSmithKline UK straight out of college, rose steadily rose through the ranks and was appointed CEO in 2008, was soon named to Prime Minister David Cameron’s business advisory board though his reputation took a hit in 2013 when the Chinese government revealed that a group of senior company executives defrauded the country’s health care system. Witty emerged relatively unscathed and in 2018 became the CEO of a division of UnitedHealth Group and was named to the top position at the parent company three years ago.

Thompson had a relatively low public profile, mostly because the media doesn’t do a great job of covering the quotidian outrages committed by health insurers. However, he and Witty appear to be the type of executives who’d prefer to see their compensation packages rise to the stratosphere rather than approve legitimate medical claims of UnitedHealthcare customers dying of cancer, which in fact is one of the many revolting actions its top executives have been accused of in the flood of media posts that praised the shooter in the aftermath of the December 4 murder.

By any reasonable measure, the act committed by Mangioni, if he in fact was the shooter, as appears to be the case, is a far less objectionable crime than the massive harm inflicted on the public by Witty, Thompson, and other healthcare CEOS and corporate officers. In any sane society, numerous industry executives would be arrested, charged, prosecuted, and sentenced to prison every year.

But the US, where jungle capitalism has reached its apotheosis and the health care industry is allowed to casually fuck its customers in the most infuriating ways, is not a sane society. During earlier eras of US history the federal government checked corporate power and greed, most notably and recently by FDR, as Perlstein highlighted. Since Ronald Reagan won the White House in 1980 and much more significantly after Bill Clinton was elected president 12 years later, which marked the decisive triumph of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party over the old New Deal coalition, the days when business was seriously regulated have steadily gone by the wayside.

Clinton’s pathetic failure to follow through on his much ballyhooed promises to reduce corporate profiteering by the health care industry and the same apathy demonstrated by his Democratic successors Barack Obama and Joe Biden has taken Medicare For All off the table and paved the way for the industry to fully capture regulators and left citizens with virtually no way to successfully seek recourse when the companies rip them off in broad daylight.

That, of course, is the main reason much of the public, from left to right, was somewhere between pleased and thrilled that Thompson was gunned down. “If you've watched a loved one suffer and die from insurance denial, it's normal to wish the people responsible would suffer the same fate,” Taylor Lorenz wrote in a terrific piece on Substack last Thursday.

The same dynamic of corporate power run amok prevails pretty much across the board throughout the US economy. In 2013, I wrote a story for Harper’s from Louisiana about landowners fighting to win compensation from oil and gas companies for willfully polluting their lands with waste products and chemicals despite being fully aware that by doing so they weren’t only damaging the environment but destroying people’s lives and health, in the same way the tobacco industry marketed cigarettes as widely as possible, including to kids, while doing its best to hide the evidence that smokers were sure to die of cancer in exceptionally large numbers.

Louisiana energy companies were able to get away with their crimes with great ease other than for occasional populist challenges, most famously during the 1928 to 1932 administration of Governor Huey Long, who viewed FDR as far too cautious in his approach to business and took a much more clearly class-centered approach to governance, and they became completely unaccountable with the broad collapse of enforcement on the part of the Environmental Protection Agency and the equivalent agency at the state level, which never acted forcefully from the start.

There was only one force Louisiana oil and gas companies feared and prevented them from acting with complete impunity: trial lawyers who represented state landowners. Say what you will about trial lawyers, and I would never romanticize them as good-hearted Salt of the Earth types, especially as many of the most prominent ones nationally and in Louisiana became spectacularly wealthy by virtue of winning class actions lawsuits against corporations, but they alone filled the void left by the absence of government regulators and inflicted serious harm to the biggest multinational energy firms in the country, in once case winning a $1 billion judgement against ExxonMobil from a jury for polluting a thirty-three-acre site near New Orleans.

Unfortunately, a judge later reduced the penalty to $112 million, but the outcome was painful for the company, especially the PR fallout. ExxonMobil’s behavior was labeled “calculated, despicable and reprehensible” by a state appeals court, which said it had acted with a “reckless disregard of the health and safety of others,” which was covered extensively in the local press.

Patty Hearst yelling orders at customers while brandishing an assault rifle during the Symbionese Liberation Army’s robbery of the Hibernia bank in San Francisco on April 15, 1974, as the group’s founder Donald DeFreeze, aka General Field Marshal Cinque, stands watch. Image captured by a bank security camera/Public Domain.

Almost all historic figures who punished the rich in favor of the poor, real and fictional, have been viewed as folk heroes since Robin Hood stalked Nottingham’s 1 percent in the 13th Century, up through Belle Starr, Bonnie and Clyde, and even the generally insane members of the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1974, which led to her being viewed sympathetically as a folk hero as well during the period she embraced her captors, but lost favor after she renounced the group and returned to being the bland, entitled, rich granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst she’d always been before she became a revolutionary bank robber.

That’s still true today in the US because even many people who are most heavily indoctrinated in favor of capitalism don’t like capitalists, especially in the contemporary age of global oligarchy, when major corporations are more powerful than many governments, and the US government openly operates as the handmaiden of business. The rage on the part of the citizenry towards the healthcare industry is rooted in the disgusting prices companies charge in insurance premium, their systematic efforts to deny paying legitimate claims to customers or generally treat them with any sense of sympathy or fairness.

People have long felt that with the industry having politicians in their pockets, they were completely powerless and outgunned by companies like UnitedHealthcare. Luigi Mangione changed that in a hurry and I join millions of others in wishing him the very best of luck in all of his future endeavors.